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Abstract:

In this paper I propose to use the I 0 tables to investigate the extent to which employment in the marketed services is due to the demand for agricultural and industrial goods.
The term industry as it is used in this paper includes the construction industry. The
matter is of some topical interest, because in recent years agricultural employment in
Ireland has been falling, industrial employment has been roughtly static and only employment in the service sectors has been rising (Conniffe and Kennedy, 1984, p.11). This
pattern is by now well recognised and is common to most, if not all, countries which have
attained a moderate degree of industrialisation. It has led to the coining of the term
"deindustrialisation" and the widespread acceptance of the belief that increases in
employment in the future are likely to take place in the service sector if they happen at
all. Yet service sector employment has received surprisingly little attention at either the
practical or theoretical level (Conniffe and Kennedy, 1984, p.201). In particular, there
has been little done to discover how much of the employment in the service sector is
traceable to final demand, and how much to the demand for services as an imput to other
sectors. By attempting to tackle this problem one hopes to gain a better understanding of
the way in which service sector employment is generated. Three specific questions are
posed in this paper, namely:
(A) How much of the employment in the Irish marketed services in 1975 was traceable
to the final demand for the output of the Goods Producing Sector (GPS)? -
(B) Is there any evidence that the pattern revealed in A above is changing over time? - (C) Does a similar investigation for the other EEC countries shed any light on the
situation in Ireland?